


I’ll Do The Walk of Shame (but I’m Not Ashamed of You)

by editingatwork



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Coming Out, Hookups, M/M, Secret Relationship, hockey boy feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-15
Updated: 2016-10-15
Packaged: 2018-08-22 13:49:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8287924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/editingatwork/pseuds/editingatwork
Summary: What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Unless you're Kent Parson.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this late at night; let me know if you find any glaring mistakes.

 

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, unless you’re Kent Parson.

He gets back to his apartment at the ass-crack of dawn. He’s hungover and fucked out and there’s an enormous bruise on his left thigh because that’s what  _happens_  when you try to make it from the door of a hotel room to the bed while kissing another guy senseless.

Kent unlocks his front door and dumps himself inside. Once the door is shut behind him he lays down in the hallway, cheek pressed to the cold wooden floor. He’s wearing yesterday’s clothes, which are actually the day  _before_  yesterday’s clothes. He’d worn them on Monday, thrown them back on Tuesday morning to wear from his apartment to the rink, and then put them back on again after the game against the Falcs.

The Falcs had beaten them 3-2. Preseason finished a week ago; these were the games that mattered. Losing sucked. Not that the Aces and their fearless leader had been crushed, but Kent hadn’t been happy.

He’d planned, up until the moment Tater texted him, to cancel their agreement to meet up after.

He’d had his reply ready in his head:  _sorry, rainchk? i’m not feeling it tonite._

He’d been sure, up until Tater’s text came in.  _i’m back in hotel. snowy and zimmboni are here but they leaving soon. maybe you can come at 11? is too late? hope you are okay after check in 2 period._

Tater hadn’t been the one to check him. Some other huge dude had done that. Kent had hit the ice but it hadn’t hurt more than usual.

Tater’s grin when he opened the door to Kent had been blinding. “You’re late,” he’d said, and pulled Kent inside by his tie.

“Your face is late,” Kent had said, drunk from his pity-party bar crawl with the team and buzzing with guilt that he’d almost said ‘no.’ Tater had kissed him against the door, hot and slow. Kent had moaned embarrassingly loud and wrapped an arm around Tater’s massive shoulders. His other hand had gotten a fistful of Tater’s Falconers t-shirt and pulled him close. Tater’s hands had found his hips, thumbs rubbing over his hipbones in a maddeningly slow manner.

“Get me on that fucking bed,” Kent had growled into Tater’s mouth. He’d been met with a chuckle and Tater’s feet moving to do just that. They’d kissed all the way to the bed. Along the way, Kent’s leg got banged up against the corner desk, and although it had hurt like a bitch, he’d bitten at Tater’s lips and repeated “I’m fine” until Tater believed him and pushed him onto the duvet.

Some minutes later, when Kent’s pants came off, Tater had found the red spot (already turning purple) and exclaimed, “You are not okay!”

“Okay, maybe not, but I am also too drunk and horny to care. Get your shirt off, Jesus Christ, why am I the only one getting naked?”

“I am get ice--”

“You are getting your ass back here and putting your hand on my dick, is what you’re doing. Tater, I swear to God--”

Less than eight hours later, Kent has gotten off his apartment floor and made it to his bedroom. He strips clumsily and sighs when he sees that he’d put his tie back on inside-out and completely missed two buttons on his shirt. Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, he sees that there’s a hickey on his neck--goddamn it, Tater--and his hair looks ridiculous. It looks like... well, like someone’s had their fingers all in it.

The cab driver hadn’t given Kent a second glance when he’d gotten in and mumbled his home address. This was Vegas. There were people doing the walk of shame at literally all hours of the day.

Kent’s scalp is sore. Tater tries not to, but he gets rough when there’s a mouth on his dick. Kent doesn’t mind. He should. He did, when they started this, but he doesn’t anymore. He likes running his hand through his mussed curls and feeling that little prickle of lingering pain. 

What sucks is that Kent still has practice to attend this morning. He knows he looks like shit when he walks in. His only consolation is that some of the guys look kinda hungover, too.

Nobody else has a big-ass hickey on their neck, though.

Swoops skates by, wearing a grin. “Have fun last night, Parser?”

"You  _wish_  you had this much game.”

He’s not the first guy to come to practice wearing signs of a good night and he won’t be the last. The team chirps him as much as they deem necessary, and with all the good-natured affection of a pack of overgrown hockey players heckling their captain. Practice leaves Kent tired but happy. Several hands pat him on the back or ruffle his hair as they leave the ice and convene in the locker room to change.

Kent’s got his duffel over one shoulder and is ready to head out when the Aces’ PR guy comes knocking. “Parson? Can you drop by my office before you go?”

The request is so casual. Kent doesn’t suspect a damn thing until he’s in the office and being met with expressions that are too carefully neutral.

He drops his duffel and takes a seat. “Something wrong?”

The only people in the room are the Aces’ PR guy, Tom Kapoor, and Tom’s assistant Sachiko. Tom types something on his laptop and turns it around. “Some gossip column posted this just after practice started.”

Kent leans forward. On the screen are two photos. One is linked from Instagram, a selfie with a fan that Kent remembers being taken the night before. Amid drinks at a bar & grill type place far away from the Vegas strip, the seven Aces who’d chosen to go out after the game had been mobbed by a group of teen fans. Autographs and selfies had followed. The photo on the website is one that was taken right before Kent had left to see Tater. One of the girls had unexpectedly thrown herself in Kent’s lap and cried, “Smile, Kent!” before snapping a photo. She’d put an arm around his shoulders and he’d awkwardly put a hand on hers, smiling as winningly as he was able with Alexei Mashkov on his mind and a seventeen-year-old-girl’s legs getting tangled with his.

He’d bowed out soon after that, blowing kisses and claiming shoulder soreness from the hit he’d taken in the game.

“You better ice that shit, Parser, we’re not picking up your slack!” Sunny had yelled after him, and that was the last time Kent had been in the vicinity of the bar or anyone in it for the rest of the night.

The photo doesn’t look as uncomfortable as it had felt at the time. It looks cozy, the girl’s smile vibrant and Kent’s sweet. But it’s not damning.

What apparently  _is_ , is the second photo. It’s a clear pre-dawn shot of Kent outside the hotel where he’d met Tater. As bad as Kent had thought he looked in his bedroom mirror, he looks worse here, like he’d put his clothes on in the dark with only one hand. And to top it off, he’s looking back over his shoulder at the hotel--not its front doors, but towards an unseen window on the building’s upper floors--wearing a painfully transparent expression of pure affection.

The article’s title is  _Aces lose but Kent Parson gets lucky?!_

It’s not the invasion of his privacy that makes him feel sick. It’s the implications of that first photo.

“I did not  _fuck a seventeen year old girl.”_

“We know.” Tom comes around his desk and sits on its edge. “Mostly because we know you, but also because I just stalked this girl’s Twitter and according to her timestamps, she’s not been anywhere near that hotel. It’s slander.”

Kent keeps looking at the photos. By themselves, they’re fine. The first is a good fan photo, and the second... The second should be a clue as to how badly Kent’s failed on what he originally told himself when he dragged Tater back to his hotel room when they met randomly in a sports bar in Philly. That being, ‘Don’t get attached.’ Because gay love and hockey was a disaster waiting to happen.

If the photo weren’t being used to underhandedly call him a pedophile, Kent would want a copy of it to keep in his nightstand drawer.

“On the other hand,” Tom is saying, “you’ve got a...” He makes a circular motion at his own neck with his finger.

“I fucking know what’s on my neck, Tom.”

“Yeah. Well. You might wanna cover that when you go home, in case reporters come sniffing.”

Kent grinds his teeth and gets a hold of the knotting tension in his chest. “Reporters don’t come sniffing because a gossip rag published some bullshit. Are you saying this is blowing up?”

Sachiko has been working on her own laptop during their discussion. “Not exactly,” she says. “The comments section has exploded, but mostly with people decrying the article’s claims. The article itself has fifty shares on Facebook, thirty on Twitter, ten on Tumblr, and less than ten on other sites.” She clicks something and waits. “Sixty shares on Facebook, thirty-five on Twitter, thirteen on Tumblr, ten on the others.” She looks up at them. “It’s not exploding, but it’s getting out there.”

Kent folds his arms. “So what do we do?”

“We wait,” Tom says. “And we ignore it in the meantime. If we treat it like it’s a big deal, it’ll turn into one. If the press _makes_ it a big deal, we’ll release a statement that politely explains it’s bullshit, and Sachi will email the newspaper that posted it with a badly veiled threat of legal action for publishing easily disproved libel.”

Kent wonders if Tater’s seen the article yet. Probably not. The Falcs’ flight left at 10am and it takes five hours to get from Vegas to Boston. It’s only noon. He imagines Tater opening up his news feed for NHL-related publications and seeing this. Kent feels a sudden, desperate need to call him.

“Kent.” Tom’s tone snaps Kent out of his head and back into the office. He’s leaning back on his hands, casual, his expression careful and kind. “I’m really glad you came out to us last year. It’s made my and Sachi’s jobs a hell of a lot easier because we can make sure we’re on your side one hundred percent. Especially in situations like this.”

Kent nods.

“Good.” He puts a hand on Kent’s shoulder. “That’s it. We’re done. You got any questions for us?”

Kent shakes his head. He looks at the computer again, at the photo outside the hotel. He knows where he’s seen that soppy expression on his own face before.

He used to look at Jack Zimmermann that way.

Jack Zimmermann might be in that hotel, but Kent knows that’s not who he was thinking of.

Fuck. Fuck his entire life.

“Actually, yeah,” he says. “Can we draft a statement in the next,” he checks his watch, “two hours?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Not about the article,” Kent adds. “I mean, yeah, about that bullshit excuse for journalism, but something else.”

\--

Kent doesn’t go home. He sits in the stadium bleachers, phone in hand, counting down the minutes until Tater’s flight lands in Boston. Although the rink is empty, he sits in the back. Nosebleed seats. He looks out at the ice, glistening and clear and slightly wet in the wake of the Zamboni. He can see all of last night’s plays happening in front of him, like ghosts, the Falconers and the Aces battling for the puck and checking the crap out of each other. He sees the place where he got slammed in to the boards in the second period. He can still taste the blood in his mouth where his lip split from the impact.

His cat is waiting for him at home. When he was lying in his hallway this morning, she’d wandered over and sniffed him. After confirming he was alive, she’d meowed until he’d gotten up and petted her. She was used to his ridiculous hours and sorry antics.

Tater was, too, come to think of it. Kent would text him at crazy hours, send him snapchats at random, call him out of the blue when he was alone and tired and ask, “What are you wearing right now?”

He’d never been to Tater’s apartment and Tater had never been to his. They met up in obscure dive bars, fucked in hotels, and grabbed time together when it was convenient. It was a rare event when either one of them stayed the night.

And yet.

Kent raids the vending machines and waits two hours until he’s sure the Falconers’ plane has landed and disembarked. He calls once and gets voicemail. “Hey, it’s me. I think you’ve landed already? Turn on your phone. And call me.”

Ten minutes later, he tries again. Another ten minutes, another call.

Tater picks up. “Hello?” There’s noise in the background. “Are you okay? I’m just turn on phone. You called a lot.”

‘Yeah. Um. Sorry. Where are you?”

“Baggage claim. I’m—Snowy, grab, grab! No, left, is black—”

Kent waits while Tater gets his luggage sorted. He thinks he hears Zimms laughing in the background but he can’t be sure. It makes his heart twist a little.

Fuck, what is he even doing.

“Hello, I’m back,” Tater says into the phone. “Sorry, Snowy not speak English.”

“Fuck you, Tater!” a voice hollers in the background, followed by an assortment of “Shut up!” and “For God’s sake, there’s _kids_ here!”

Tater moves away from the noise and into a patch of quiet. “I can hear you now. Are you okay?”

Kent takes a breath. What comes out isn’t what he means to say. “I can’t do this anymore.”

Tater’s quiet for an awful moment. “Okay.”

“Have you been online yet? Checked Facebook, Twitter, the gossip columns, anything?”

“Kent, I am _just_ get off plane,” Tater says, and the fact that he’s using Kent’s name means he’s somewhere he doesn’t think people will hear. “I turned on my phone, see your calls. Then you call me.” The words and the sentences are short but Tater’s voice is gentle and calm. Reassuring. Kent can picture him, huddled in a corner of the airport with his bag leaning against his side. Kent wants him here, now. He wants to go back to last night; back to Tater pressing him into the softness of the hotel bedsheets and kissing him so thoroughly it made his head light. He wants to go back to fumbling in the dark for his pants and his shoes, with Tater whispering light-hearted chirps every time he tripped or dropped something.

He wants to go back to before he had to think about _why_ he misses all that so much.

“Okay, so, don’t freak out, but there’s an article online with pics of me from this morning. Leaving the Falcs’ hotel? And there’s also a pic I took with a fan. And it, the article is, it’s implying—You know what, nevermind what it’s implying. Just. I can’t do this anymore. You gave me a hickey the size of Idaho and I got chirped about it all morning. Which I don’t care about, but I’m gonna have to hide it when I go home, or when I get my goddamn groceries, and that? I can’t do that anymore. I can’t do this lying and sneaking and deflecting anymore.”

“…Maybe it is my English, but I not understood half of what you said,” Tater says slowly. “Just something about article, and hickey, and teammates chirping you. And not doing this anymore. Last part, I understand. Is okay.”

Kent’s heart swells. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You are right. If there is article, with picture, is not safe. We stop. Is okay.”

Kent’s sitting with his feet propped up on the seats in front of him. Tater’s words make him nearly slip out onto the concrete floor. “Wait, _what_? Back the fuck up, I’m not breaking up.”

“Breaking up is dating. We’re not dating.” Tater’s voice is soft. Maybe Kent imagines it, but he thinks there’s a question in there; asking Kent to confirm or refute that.

“We could. Officially. Or as officially as, you know.”

Kent thinks he hears Tater swallow. “I would like that.”

“Me, too. I would really, really like that. Which brings me to what I was saying in the first place, which is that if I’m gonna wear your goddamn hickeys, I don’t want people assuming I got them from a woman.” Kent takes a breath. “I want to come out. Publically.”

Tater doesn’t say anything.

“Please say something.”

“Zimmboni knows. About us.”

It’s Kent’s turn to be speechless.

“I’m not tell him,” Tater continues. “This morning, he bring me coffee before plane and say he saw you outside hotel getting cab. Said he smell your cologne. On me.”

Kent buries his face in his hands and groans in mortification. “Jesus fucking Christ, Zimms, no fucking tact, none at all.”

“He is very red when he say it.” Tater doesn’t sound nearly as embarrassed as Kent thinks he should. “He not hate you, Kent. You always asking, ‘How is Zimms?’ He ask me today, if you are happy.”

Kent is not going to cry in the middle of the goddamn Aces Hockey Center.

“Are you?”

“’M trying,” he mumbles, not sure if Tater hears him. “What about you, Tater, are you happy?”

Tater hums. “I am dating famous hockey player Kent Parson. I’m… okay.”

“Okay? I blew your fucking mind last night, you better be a damn sight better than ‘okay’.”

“I am dating famous hockey player Kent Parson,” Tater repeats. “But he is selfish man. Not let me meet his famous cat.”

Kent tries to remember if he’s ever seen Tater on Instagram. “I know you know about my cat, but how do you know she’s _famous_?”

“Snowy think your cat is very cute. Show me photos. All the time. Why you take so many photos of same cat? I want to meet famous cat, Kent.”

“Christ, fine. You can come meet her the next time you’re in Vegas. Okay? The Aces can kick the Falconers’ asses and then you can come over and meet my cat. Happy?”

Tater hums. “Yes. Falconers not lose, but even so. I’m happy.”

“Good.” Something’s unfurling in Kent’s chest. “Good. So, about me coming out... I’ve already talked to the Aces PR. I’m out to the team. I just want to make it clear to the entire world that if I’m walking around with hickeys and bruises, looking like I got my brains fucked out the night before, it was a man who did it.”

Tater’s gone quiet again.

“You there?”

“…I’m still have to get on bus home, Kent. With teammates.”

Kent grins. “You should see this pic of me, ‘Tate. My clothes are a disaster and my hair’s a mess, ‘cause you get grabby when I blow you. I dunno if the hickey is visible in the photo, but I saw it in my bathroom mirror and it’s big and purple. I think there are teeth marks. Possessive much?”

“Yes,” Tater growls. “I am hanging up now.”

“Yeah, fine. No, wait! Wait!” Kent jerks up in his seat. “Wait, I’m serious, I gotta ask you something. Is it okay with you? If I come out.”

“Why you have to ask me?”

“Because if I come out, the chances of you getting outed by association someday rises exponentially. Especially if we’re… you know. Actually together.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

There’s no pause before Tater’s reply. “Is okay.”

“You’re sure. You’re one hundred percent sure.”

“I am sure.” He doesn’t sound it. He sounds about seventy percent sure, tops. But Kent isn’t going to call him on it; he understands the feeling. “I have family, in Russia. If I am come out… maybe I can’t go home. But if you come out, you are not having to hide anymore. And if I come out, someday.” Tater takes an unsteady breath. “Maybe I’m not have to hide, either. I would like that.”

Kent swallows around a lump in his throat. “Me, too.”

“I have to go,” Tater says. “Can I call you? When I am home?”

“You can call me any time you want.”

“You, too.” His voice is so soft, so loving. “Bye, Kent.”

“Bye, babe.”

Tater chuckles and hangs up.

Kent sits for a while with his arms and legs splayed out on the seats while he processes everything that just happened. They’d talked for less than twenty minutes. He can’t believe how different his life is now.

He remembers that Tom and Sachi are waiting in the office for him to come back and deliver a verdict on his ‘coming out’ statement. It takes him a few tries, but he manages to get up and head back down the aisles towards the rink exit.

He’s scared shitless of what he’s about to do. But he’s had enough of feeling ashamed, and if he’s going to get messed up the night before and get photographed grinning up at a hotel window like a lovesick idiot, he’s damn well going to make sure nobody’s mistaken on the reason why.

**Author's Note:**

> join me in rarepair hell on [tumblr](http://punmasterkentparson.tumblr.com/).


End file.
